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Sunday 7 September 2008

What killed Sally Clark’s child?

Neville Hodgkinson asks why the jury in the Sally Clark trial was told to discount the DTP jab given to her second child, Harry, just five hours before he was found dead

Not many people know these facts, because at Sally’s trial the defence did not mention immunisation as a possible cause of death. Two prosecution witnesses, including the paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, assured the jury it could be discounted. Their statements went unchallenged, and the issue did not form any part of the appeal hearings. Professor Meadow, a former member of a Department of Health sub-committee on adverse reactions to vaccines, told the jury that he could not think of any natural explanation for Harry’s or Christopher’s deaths.

Yet the DTP vaccine they both received can unquestionably cause alarming and occasionally life-threatening reactions in susceptible babies. The pertussis (whooping cough) component, made from whole cells of the microbe, has been especially implicated as a cause of permanent brain damage and death. The evidence was spelled out in an unpublished 150-page report to the Department of Health by Dr Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of public health at the University of Glasgow and a world authority on vaccine safety.

Professor Stewart’s report, first submitted at the request of the chief scientist in 1983 and updated in 1998 and 2006, also shows that, unlike the other vaccines, pertussis is ineffective — there has been widespread recurrence of whooping cough in fully vaccinated children in Europe and the USA. For these reasons several countries, including West Germany, Italy and Japan, removed it from their infant vaccination schedule. The report calls on the UK to do the same.

Harry Clark died in 1998, when the DTP vaccine also contained a controversial preservative, thiomersal, comprising 50 per cent mercury. Its use in childhood vaccines has recently been phased out in the UK, following concerns that it may have contributed to a rise in developmental disorders, especially autism. Last year the whole-cell pertussis vaccine was also finally abandoned in the UK, years after most other countries, in favour of a safer version.

Sally Clark, a solicitor, was freed after a huge campaign by friends, family and other supporters who recognised a gross miscarriage of justice. Her story was told by John Batt, also a solicitor and a family friend, in his book Stolen Innocence, described by the British Medical Journal as ‘a terrible indictment of the criminal system, the legal profession and our own experts’. The book highlighted seemingly arbitrary, shifting and conflicting ‘expert’ opinions. Where some saw signs of abuse, others were emphatic that these were probably misinterpretations of natural events, including damage at birth and post mortem. Mrs Clark had a serious drink problem, which worsened after Christopher’s death; but there was no evidence of her being anything other than a caring mother towards her children.

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